In An Arid Land (18 page)

"Speak to me," she whispered now in an unfocused anger.

She got out of bed. It was 5:44. She had been awake at least an hour. Quickly she made her way through the dark tunnel of the hall, tying the sash of her robe as she went, and at the instant she turned into the living room door, the same door through which she passed every morning, something rose up and stopped her: a bump against her head. She leapt backwards, and a gasp, a silent scream, escaped from deep inside her. It was him.

"My God, you frightened me."

"I'm sorry," he said, standing perfectly still in the doorway. "I was coming to wake you. I have to talk to you."

They stared at each other in a growing silence until the silence drove her to speak, "Yes, good."

He led her out to the landing and more or less put her into her chair and then he said, "I'll be right back." The day was just beginning, with a wan pink light in the east and the first sounds of the birds rustling and chortling in the yard. He returned with two coffee mugs and sat in his chair and then, as if to put her at her ease, as if he were telling a joke at the beginning of a speech, he mentioned the armadillo that visited the yard in the wee hours every morning to root for grubs in the flower beds. "There's no pattern to it, once he's in the yard. Five or ten minutes is all he gives us and then he's gone next door, I guess. I've seen the marks in the ground during the day but didn't know what they were." He went quiet, reflective. "And there's a deer that comes up out of the woods most mornings there, just across the road. We'll stare at each other for a few minutes and then she goes away, very quietly and delicately. It's beautiful. Oh, and there's an owl living nearby. I see her two or three times a week, about now in fact." Again he reflected. "You see, I've learned a lot getting up early."

She seized the opening. "What is it you've learned?"

He snorted a quick laugh through his nose, then looked at her and smiled sadly. "I've learned about evil," he said.

This threw her back after the touching way he had spoken of the animals that visited him here in his solitude, and
evil
was not a word she could remember ever hearing him use before. But she said, "In the world, you mean? Evil in the world?"

"No. That I've known of for a long time. It's not the evil you see on the front page, that's not what I mean; it's the evil inside that I've learned about." Suddenly he pointed out above the yard and hissed, "Look! It's the owl." But she was too slow and the bird too swift, and when she turned she saw nothing but the same trees, the same leaves growing restless now under the gathering light. "I missed it," she said and he nodded, smiled as if pleased that he had been able to confirm his earlier report.

The smile fell away quickly and his face reformed itself into the mask of sadness, almost a frown, and, in the quick juxtaposition of the two expressions, she saw how tired he was and she saw that he seemed resigned to his exhaustion, as if it were a permanent state of mind.

"Go on," she said.

Very abruptly he began, "A letter arrived yesterday from my brother he's dealing with the estate, you know and in the letter was a check . . . ." He looked at her as if to see whether she was prepared for him to continue, and she nodded her head to encourage him. "The check is for a lot of money, more money than we could earn together doing what we're doing in ten years. I've known it was coming for some time, but I didn't know it would be so large. We could do anything we want. We could travel. Buy a new house. Anything. To put it simply, we're almost rich."

She couldn't contain her excitement. She said, "I thought your brother had it all in the business."

"No. There was the house. It was in the will."

"Why haven't you told me?"

"Because . . . because we'll have to give it away."

She started to protest, but he stopped her.

"The night before my father passed away I sat in this chair, at this spot I was just killing time before going in to bed I sat here and I started thinking about him and how he was and always had been and I remembered things I hadn't thought of in years. Little things, things he had done to me or said to me when I was young, things he would never even remember, things that I hated, and the more I thought about them the more I hated them, and the more I hated them, the more I hated him, the one who had done them, even though I loved him because he was my father. The things I thought about are the sorts of things that go on between all fathers and sons, and, I'd imagine, between all mothers and daughters . . . you know, humiliations and fears and that horrible, horrible longing to please even though you know you can't, could never really please, and that constant feeling that whatever you do it's a disappointment." He paused, thinking, gazing into the trees.

"I remember once," he said and then told her of a summer during college when he had gone home to work at the store with the title of Summer Assistant Manager, and how one day he had been assigned to set up a sale display of lawn mowers. He labored over it all morning, planning it, hanging a banner and signs, lining up the mowers perfectly from the least expensive to the most so the customers could compare. He told her how his father, as he was leaving for lunch with the manager, paused long enough only to say, "No no, they're backwards," and then called over a stock boy,
a stock boy,
to show him how to do it correctly.

"To anyone else in the world he would have said at least, 'Good job, good try,' but not to me, his son. I know it's petty, it's nothing, but I hated it and I hated him. And as I thought about that, and how it's been the same old thing time after time, and how all these years I've had this feeling that I was still waiting really to start my life, even now at the age of forty, and how it would only start when he was gone and I could put him behind me so that whatever I did wouldn't matter anymore because he wouldn't be around, and I wouldn't feel guilty for not doing what he had always wanted me to do to run that grubby business with my brother and that night, sitting here in this chair, I wished he would die. Right then. Immediately . . . ."

He went on talking for a long time, confessing secrets as if to a minister with the same sort of energy that pours from an exhausted child explaining
what happened
to make him sin. He even mentioned that at times he had wished she, too, would die so he could start over completely, living exactly the way he had always thought he would live before he had become frightened of the world and decided to marry, but she heard very little of it. She didn't want to hear it and didn't need to hear anymore, now that she knew. Then he cried, and as she held his head against her breasts, muttering, "You poor man," she felt a great release in the regions of her heart, like the release she always felt once a storm arrived. She inhaled a deep breath, exhaled loudly and he must have taken it wrong, as he was unable to see her face, for he mumbled, "Don't cry, it's not you," and she stroked his hair. "I know," she said, and he cried all the more violently. She held him and rocked him gently in the chair to soothe him as he sobbed and then as he whimpered and then as he began to sniffle. It was mostly over now, and she didn't know what to say, so her mind wandered. She thought of the money, but this passed quickly, and she began to think of the many little things, the necessary and important things that she needed to do to prepare them for the day. They would want more coffee and the dishes needed washing and the living room needed picking up. And then she remembered the alarm. It was well past six by now and she imagined the clock's high-pitched electronic pulses assailing the dark serenity of the empty bedroom, and she could almost see the sound it made, like the constant flashing of a buoy's beacon across the waters of a night-hushed lake, and then she could almost feel the rhythmic pulses of the sound coming to her in vibrations through the walls and the floors and the redwood chair, and she knew that would be the first thing she tended to when this ended and they went back inside the house.

Something moved among the trees out over the road and she said, "Oh, look, it's the owl," but he didn't lift his head and when she glanced at her lap she saw that he was sleeping.

I

Millhouse at the wheel. And Helen talking.

"
The Reader's Digest
says you should prepare, buy the things you'll need appliances, cars, that sort of thing, things that'll last" She shifted her broad hips on the cracked vinyl seat of the Oldsmobile, the trade-in that for thirteen years had taken them to work and to church at the First Methodist and out to eat on Thursday nights. Her voice dropped, the tone gentle like an undertaker's; she enunciated, "'So as to ease the transition of retirement and to enrich the last, best years of your life.'"

"Hah!" said Millhouse, working to keep the car between the stripes of his lane. "Rich?" he said. He guided the Oldsmobile, transmission clattering, engine smoking, off the freeway ramp and toward the dealership's used car lot. It chugged, hissed, it died on the access road, blocking traffic at the entrance to the dealership, and a tow truck hauled it away. They were silent with each other for a long time as a salesman showed them different models and took them for a test drive in a Chevette.

"Ain't it great," said the salesman, Johnny, scratching an itch under the penguin on his golf shirt. "Power steering, reinforced suspension, Body by Fisher, just like riding on a cloud." He smiled, "Or in an Oldsmobile."

"It's wonderful," Helen said from the back seat.

"Hah!" said Millhouse, but Johnny, behind his sunglasses, didn't seem to hear. Millhouse drove straight to the dealership, got out, said, "We'll take it."

In the showroom, waiting for the contract, they rested, sipping Cokes, in the front seat of a shiny red Corvette, the price on the sticker half again as much as the price of their first house. He said, "This one, you know, that little car out there, it's going to have to take us to the Pearly Gates."

He knew it would draw her out. He hated her silence; he wanted her to speak. But more, he wanted her to admit it, to acquiesce, to join him in his misery, to say, yes, you're right, after thirty-nine years of struggling, of suffering under the weight of it all, it's over, we're buying an $8,000 coffin. Now, finally, the funeral can begin.

She said, "You're right, Charlie, but at least this one won't break down on the way."

Through his bifocals he saw something of the young Helen in the upper regions of her face the dead-set brow, the firm straight nose but something forbidding in the folds of her jowls. He beat the horn with his fist, two quick honks that bellowed through the showroom, and everyone looked over.

He said, "Two points for you."

"If you keep this up, Charlie, we may need a new pickup, too, so we can both get to the Pearly Gates."

He hit the horn again. "Two more points." Everyone was looking, and a suited salesman started toward them. Millhouse waved through the window, grinned, and the salesman stopped, nodded, smiled at the old people, went back to his customers.

Millhouse gripped the wheel of the Corvette until his knuckles went white. He rubbed the bit of arthritis in his hand. He saw disappointment or disgust or humiliation in the glaze of her eyes, the taut mouth, the rigid, almost quivering jaw.

"I'm scared," he said.

She reached out as if to touch him, but held back. She scrounged through her shoulder bag and found his stomach medicine: "Here, take one of these, relax. And please, please Charlie, quit talking about the Pearly Gates."

II

Millhouse at the pier. Millhouse on the porch. It's been two months now and a pattern is developing. Millhouse in his recliner. He has the time now even to dote on himself. Afternoons, gazing into the bathroom mirror, his cup of Folgers cooling on the counter top, he considers the curves and lines of his face. He clips his nose hairs. He strokes his moustache with the tiny purple comb that Helen gave him when he stopped shaving his lip in mute celebration of the end of a career: four decades as a traffic-light specialist for the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas. The moustache came out salt and pepper, not yet the silky white of his hair, so thin and fine to the touch, like the soft brown tufts on the heads of his grandchildren. The lobes hang long, flabby, and the chin has doubled, tripled, but the nose is the same, a slight crook, pointed at the end. An honorable nose.

At the bedroom window, his hands behind his back, Millhouse thinking: azaleas; I'll plant azaleas for Helen under those four pines in a thick bed of mulch. But it will have to wait: too much to do. Paint, mow, fix the fences, the rotting porch, the septic tank. He wants the place in good shape, easy for Helen to keep up in case . . . in case something happens to him and she is left alone. But where to begin? And the county hasn't had a drop of rain since the week he cleared out his desk. How's a man to work with dehydration always threatening to strangle him?

Millhouse making the bed. The smooth melody of a Harry James tune seeps through the house like a vapor from the long-silent hi-fi he found in a closet of the second bedroom where the girls slept on weekends. He pauses, listens, glances at the pictures on the wall Sheila, dark, on the left, Gloria, blonde, on the right and the plaque of APPRECIATION from the City.

Sometimes, when he's feeling up to it, he cooks supper for Helen chicken pot pies or a frozen pizza, whatever's in the box, hot and on the table when she walks in the door. He enjoys doing it for Helen, Helen, who rolls with life like a cork on waves, who is still working, a new job close to home, not in Houston. She drives in to Huntsville at eight, out from Huntsville at five, in the new Chevette.

Helen is late today. He goes out to the porch to wait, reclining in his lawn chair. On Fridays they used to hurry to get away, drive up to the house, spend the weekend, go back in on Monday. That was then, before he retired and they moved to the old farmhouse for good. He misses the excitement of unlocking the door to a dark kitchen, turning on lights in the close, dark smell, going from room to room to see that nothing had changed.